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It can be shown also that the intellectual act would similarly
be impossible if the soul were any form of body.
If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul's employment of
the body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it
would be identical with sensation. If then intellection is
apprehension apart from body, much more must there be a
distinction between the body and the intellective principle:
sensation for objects of sense, intellection for the intellectual
object. And even if this be rejected, it must still be admitted
that there do exist intellections of intellectual objects and
perceptions of objects not possessing magnitude: how, we may then
ask, can a thing of magnitude know a thing that has no magnitude,
or how can the partless be known by means of what has parts? We
will be told "By some partless part." But, at this, the
intellective will not be body: for contact does not need a whole;
one point suffices. If then it be conceded- and it cannot be
denied- that the primal intellections deal with objects
completely incorporeal, the principle of intellection itself must
know by virtue of being, or becoming, free from body. Even if
they hold that all intellection deals with the ideal forms in
Matter, still it always takes place by abstraction from the
bodies [in which these forms appear] and the separating agent is
the Intellectual-Principle. For assuredly the process by which we
abstract circle, triangle, line or point, is not carried through
by the aid of flesh or Matter of any kind; in all such acts the
soul or mind must separate itself from the material: at once we
see that it cannot be itself material. Similarly it will be
agreed that, as beauty and justice are things without magnitude,
so must be the intellective act that grasps them.
When such non-magnitudes come before the soul, it receives them
by means of its partless phase and they will take position there
in partless wise.
Again: if the Soul is a body, how can we account for its virtues-
moral excellence [Sophrosyne], justice, courage and so forth? All
these could be only some kind of rarefied body [pneuma], or blood
in some form; or we might see courage as a certain resisting
power in that pneuma; moral quality would be its happy blending;
beauty would lie wholly in the agreeable form of impressions
received, such comeliness as leads us to describe people as
attractive and beautiful from their bodily appearance. No doubt
strength and grace of form go well enough with the idea of
rarefied body; but what can this rarefied body want with moral
excellence? On the contrary its interest would lie in being
comfortable in its environments and contacts, in being warmed or
pleasantly cool, in bringing everything smooth and caressing and
soft around it: what could it care about a just distribution?
Then consider the objects of the soul's contemplation, virtue and
the other Intellectual forms with which it is occupied; are these
eternal or are we to think that virtue rises here or there,
helps, then perishes? These things must have an author and a
source and there, again, we are confronted by something
perdurable: the soul's contemplation, then, must be of the
eternal and unchanging, like the concepts of geometry: if eternal
and unchanging, these objects are not bodies: and that which is
to receive them must be of equivalent nature: it cannot therefore
be body, since all body-nature lacks permanence, is a thing of
flux.
8. A. [sometimes appearing as 9] There are those who insist on
the activities observed in bodies- warming, chilling, thrusting,
pressing- and class soul with body, as it were to assure its
efficacy. This ignores the double fact that the very bodies
themselves exercise such efficiency by means of the incorporeal
powers operating in them, and that these are not the powers we
attribute to soul: intellection, perception, reasoning, desire,
wise and effective action in all regards, these point to a very
different form of being.
In transferring to bodies the powers of the unembodied, this
school leaves nothing to that higher order. And yet that it is
precisely in virtue of bodiless powers that bodies possess their
efficiency is clear from certain reflections:
It will be admitted that quality and quantity are two different
things, that body is always a thing of quantity but not always a
thing of quality: matter is not qualified. This admitted, it will
not be denied that quality, being a different thing from
quantity, is a different thing from body. Obviously quality could
not be body when it has not quantity as all body must; and,
again, as we have said, body, any thing of mass, on being reduced
to fragments, ceases to be what it was, but the quality it
possessed remains intact in every particle- for instance the
sweetness of honey is still sweetness in each speck- this shows
that sweetness and all other qualities are not body.
Further: if the powers in question were bodies, then necessarily
the stronger powers would be large masses and those less
efficient small masses: but if there are large masses with small
while not a few of the smaller masses manifest great powers, then
the efficiency must be vested in something other than magnitude;
efficacy, thus, belongs to non-magnitude. Again; Matter, they
tell us, remains unchanged as long as it is body, but produces
variety upon accepting qualities; is not this proof enough that
the entrants [with whose arrival the changes happen] are
Reason-Principles and not of the bodily order?
They must not remind us that when pneuma and blood are no longer
present, animals die: these are necessary no doubt to life, but
so are many other things of which none could possibly be soul:
and neither pneuma nor blood is present throughout the entire
being; but soul is.
8. B. (10) If the soul is body and permeates the entire
body-mass, still even in this entire permeation the blending must
be in accord with what occurs in all cases of bodily admixing.
Now: if in the admixing of bodies neither constituent can retain
its efficacy, the soul too could no longer be effective within
the bodies; it could but be latent; it will have lost that by
which it is soul, just as in an admixture of sweet and bitter the
sweet disappears: we have, thus, no soul.
Two bodies [i.e., by hypothesis, the soul and the human body] are
blended, each entire through the entirety of the other; where the
one is, the other is also; each occupies an equal extension and
each the whole extension; no increase of size has been caused by
the juncture: the one body thus inblended can have left in the
other nothing undivided. This is no case of mixing in the sense
of considerable portions alternating; that would be described as
collocation; no; the incoming entity goes through the other to
the very minutest point- an impossibility, of course; the less
becoming equal to the greater; still, all is traversed throughout
and divided throughout. Now if, thus, the inblending is to occur
point by point, leaving no undivided material anywhere, the
division of the body concerned must have been a division into
(geometrical) points: an impossibility. The division is an
infinite series- any material particle may be cut in two- and the
infinities are not merely potential, they are actual.
Therefore body cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a
whole. But soul does this. It is therefore incorporeal.
8. C. (11) We come to the theory that this pneuma is an earlier
form, one which on entering the cold and being tempered by it
develops into soul by growing finer under that new condition.
This is absurd at the start, since many living beings rise in
warmth and have a soul that has been tempered by cold: still that
is the theory- the soul has an earlier form, and develops its
true nature by force of external accidents. Thus these teachers
make the inferior precede the higher, and before that inferior
they put something still lower, their "Habitude." It is obvious
that the Intellectual-Principle is last and has sprung from the
soul, for, if it were first of all, the order of the series must
be, second the soul, then the nature-principle, and always the
later inferior, as the system actually stands.
If they treat God as they do the Intellectual-Principle- as
later, engendered and deriving intellection from without- soul
and intellect and God may prove to have no existence: this would
follow if a potentiality could not come to existence, or does not
become actual, unless the corresponding actuality exists. And
what could lead it onward if there were no separate being in
previous actuality? Even on the absurd supposition that the
potentially existent brings itself to actuality, it must be
looking to some Term, and that must be no potentiality but
actual.
No doubt the eternally self-identical may have potentiality and
be self-led to self-realization, but even in this case the being
considered as actualized is of higher order than the being
considered as merely capable of actualization and moving towards
a desired Term.
Thus the higher is the earlier, and it has a nature other than
body, and it exists always in actuality: Intellectual-Principle
and Soul precede Nature: thus, Soul does not stand at the level
of pneuma or of body.
These arguments are sufficient in themselves, though many others
have been framed, to show that the soul is not to be thought of
as a body.
8. D. (12) Soul belongs, then, to another Nature: What is this?
Is it something which, while distinct from body, still belongs to
it, for example a harmony or accord?
The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul is,
with some difference, comparable to the accord in the strings of
a lyre. When the lyre is strung a certain condition is produced
upon the strings, and this is known as accord: in the same way
our body is formed of distinct constituents brought together, and
the blend produces at once life and that soul which is the
condition existing upon the bodily total.
That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length.
The soul is a prior [to body], the accord is a secondary to the
lyre. Soul rules, guides and often combats the body; as an accord
of body it could not do these things. Soul is a real being,
accord is not. That due blending [or accord] of the corporeal
materials which constitute our frame would be simply health. Each
separate part of the body, entering as a distinct entity into the
total, would require a distinct soul [its own accord or note], so
that there would be many souls to each person. Weightiest of all;
before this soul there would have to be another soul to bring
about the accord as, in the case of the musical instrument, there
is the musician who produces the accord upon the strings by his
own possession of the principle on which he tunes them: neither
musical strings nor human bodies could put themselves in tune.
Briefly, the soulless is treated as ensouled, the unordered
becomes orderly by accident, and instead of order being due to
soul, soul itself owes its substantial existence to order- which
is self-caused. Neither in the sphere of the partial, nor in that
of Wholes could this be true. The soul, therefore, is not a
harmony or accord.
8. E. (13) We come to the doctrine of the Entelechy, and must
enquire how it is applied to soul.
It is thought that in the Conjoint of body and soul the soul
holds the rank of Form to the Matter which here is the ensouled
body- not, then, Form to every example of body or to body as
merely such, but to a natural organic body having the
potentiality of life.
Now; if the soul has been so injected as to be assimilated into
the body as the design of a statue is worked into the bronze, it
will follow that, upon any dividing of the body, the soul is
divided with it, and if any part of the body is cut away a
fragment of soul must go with it. Since an Entelechy must be
inseparable from the being of which it is the accomplished
actuality, the withdrawal of the soul in sleep cannot occur; in
fact sleep itself cannot occur. Moreover if the soul is an
Entelechy, there is an end to the resistance offered by reason to
the desires; the total [of body and Entelechy-Soul] must have
one-uniform experience throughout, and be aware of no internal
contradiction. Sense-perception might occur; but intellection
would be impossible. The very upholders of the Entelechy are thus
compelled to introduce another soul, the Intellect, to which they
ascribe immortality. The reasoning soul, then, must be an
Entelechy- if the word is to be used at all- in some other mode.
Even the sense-perceiving soul, in its possession of the
impressions of absent objects, must hold these without aid from
the body; for otherwise the impression must be present in it like
shape and images, and that would mean that it could not take in
fresh impressions; the perceptive soul, then, cannot be described
as this Entelechy inseparable from the body. Similarly the
desiring principle, dealing not only with food and drink but with
things quite apart from body; this also is no inseparable
Entelechy.
There remains the vegetal principle which might seem to suggest
the possibility that, in this phase, the soul may be the
inseparable Entelechy of the doctrine. But it is not so. The
principle of every growth lies at the root; in many plants the
new springing takes place at the root or just above it: it is
clear that the life-principle, the vegetal soul, has abandoned
the upper portions to concentrate itself at that one spot: it was
therefore not present in the whole as an inseparable Entelechy.
Again, before the plant's development the life-principle is
situated in that small beginning: if, thus, it passes from large
growth to small and from the small to the entire growth, why
should it not pass outside altogether?
An Entelechy is not a thing of parts; how then could it be
present partwise in the partible body?
An identical soul is now the soul of one living being now of
another: how could the soul of the first become the soul of the
latter if soul were the Entelechy of one particular being? Yet
that this transference does occur is evident from the facts of
animal metasomatosis.
The substantial existence of the soul, then, does not depend upon
serving as Form to anything: it is an Essence which does not come
into being by finding a seat in body; it exists before it becomes
also the soul of some particular, for example, of a living being,
whose body would by this doctrine be the author of its soul.
What, then, is the soul's Being? If it is neither body nor a
state or experience of body, but is act and creation: if it holds
much and gives much, and is an existence outside of body; of what
order and character must it be? Clearly it is what we describe as
Veritable Essence. The other order, the entire corporeal Kind, is
process; it appears and it perishes; in reality it never
possesses Being, but is merely protected, in so far as it has the
capacity, by participating in what authentically is.
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